Continuity Task

Our task involved: filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.


We had two members of our class to be in our film. They were Daniel Riman and Miss Bennet. The whole plot of the film would be about Miss Bennet telling Daniel that he is the top achiever in Drama.


We started off with the camera pointing a the door. Then Miss Bennet would come in.She will then sit down on a chair opposite Daniel. This would cut to a medium shot of Miss Bennet talking. This will cut to a medium shot of Daniels reaction (zoom in to his face). Then it will cut to an over the shoulder shot starting on Miss Bennett right shoulder and shifting to her left shoulder. It will then cut to a medium shot of Daniel looking for his mum on his phone contacts (zoom in to his phone). Cut to a close up shot of his phone (zoom in to mum). Finally this cuts to another medium shot of Daniel talking to his mum.

Why are opening title sequences so important to the film industry?

Saul Bass, a famous graphic designer in the film industry, once stated that 'making a main-title was like making a poster, you're condensing the event into this one concept, this one metaphor a back-story that needs to be told or a character that needs to be introduced'.

The title sequence of a movie can be the most impotent element in the whole film. This is because except trailers, these are the first images the audience sees when the movie starts. These sequences last about two to three minutes. However they can set up the director’s intentions, the story line, the genre and the expectations of the audience.

Furthermore this sequence tells you who directed are stared in this film. So the audience can expect how the film is going to be like by basing the movie on the teams past work. Also if the audience likes the sequence then they will have a good first impression and will be drawn in the watch the rest of the movie. Taking all of these factors into account, I think that the opening title sequence of any movie is the most crucial element in the film industry.

Genre

Kidulthood comes under the drama genre. This is because it's a serious, dramatic film that portrays realistic characters, in a real setting, under real life situations. Also the movie doesn't focus on special effects and comedy. The sub-genre is arthouse. This is because its a serious, independently made film which is aimed at a specific audience. It is an experimental film that is not aimed at the mass market so its a small budget film. Our film will be the same genres as this film but it will be based on the reality of an average teenager and what the character goes through.

Audience Research

Before choosing a film genre to base our opening scene on, we created a questionnaire in order to find out what sort of genre people enjoy and what factors are needed in an opening title sequence to make it effective.

The questionnaire that we had prepared consisted of the following questions:

• Whether their male or female
• How old they were
• What is most effective in a film?
• What makes a good opening title sequence?
• When was the last time they watched a film
• What type of story is most interesting?
• Anything inappropriate in an opening sequence?
• What background music do they best prefer

We created graphs based on the results we got. It was necessary to ask these questions as we needed to know our target audience and what kind of things they find effective in a opening sequence and what things are inappropriate in it.

We found out that a lot of people believed that having good visual effects is the most important factor to have in an opening sequence. One factor that people enjoyed the least in an opening sequence is text and dialogue. From this, we concluded as a group, that we should have as little text and dialogue as possible in our film. As well as special effects, people believed that music and action is important too. So we would have to make the music relevant to the movie and make it flow with the sequence. The ending of the sequence should have a cliff hanger to make the audience wanting to know more. In addition to this, we concluded from our results that our opening sequence should be a crime/ urban drama because the target audience is between teenagers and 20’s.

Title Ideas

This is a brainstorm of titles that we created. This helped us to decide what the title of our film would be.

Shooting Schedule

This was the schedule we made and followed at the beginning of this project:

Initial Script

1. Inside Vishals bedroom - int / day (morning)
In a normal average house, we see a typical teenagers bedroom, messy, untidy, with big posters on the wall. We see think that a person is sleeping as we can not see the character, as Vishals head is under the duvet. We also see the mobile phone on the side which makes us think that it is just about to go off.

(First Action) Vishal under his duvet, gets up to snooze his alarm, and this is the first we see his face. Gradually he gets out of bed and walks out of his room. He then enters the bathroom, and the camera is still running but we don't see anything, only hear the general routine. The effect of not showing when he enters the bathroom is to create tension so the audience thinks its a black out. He then walks back into his room and once again a black-out.

2. Outside Vishals House - ext / day (morning)
He walks out of the house dressed as a typical teenager. The audience does not think he is bad person or anything which would mean he is a bad influence or a ruthless teenager.

3. Vishal travelling to Beavers Park - ext / day (morning)
We see Vishal approaching in the distance on a bike. We already see another guy coming towards him looking very suspicious. Suddenly they make a sudden handshake, where the drug and money have been exchanged. Then very quickly Vishal leaves him and travels to another destination, which we don't know where. Now he is at the entrance of the park and we see another guy coming towards him. He has a strange way of walking and has a very wide jaw. Vishal then quickly exchanged the money for the weapon.

4. Vishal going to College - ext / day (morning)

Vishal was cycling but we see him now entering a college, we know this because he stood there  for a couple of seconds thinking whether it is his college or not, as he is suffering from schizophrenia. He walks in and we also see him through CCTV footage. 

5. Vishal inside College - int / day morning
We know see him going up some stairs with a baseball bat, this was the weapon he bought from the drug money. He walks into a classroom and the buzzer goes off.